


Light Out

by Lilliburlero



Category: King Rat - James Clavell
Genre: 1940s, Gen, Homophobic Language, Post-Canon, Prisoner of War, Racist Language, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 08:32:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13498396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: The King, back home.*Note: period- and canon-typical racist and homophobic language.





	Light Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [looselipssinksubs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/looselipssinksubs/gifts).



> Thank you to [disenchanted](http://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted) for beta-reading.

_Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…_

He never actually saw that movie. Whoever wrote it didn’t know much about gin joints. Sooner or later, everyone you’d ever known walked in. If you’d been on the road sometime in your life, you were linked inseparably to every other no-good moocher, all the bums in all the world do-si-do-ing in a solemn square-dance over the entire surface of the globe. And Changi had made bums of them all, whatever they were before, whatever they became, whether they’d gotten themselves a white picket fence or his own blue ticket, the faggot’s discharge, the spook’s discharge. He’d seen Dino and Kurt, Miller and Max and Byron Jones. They hadn’t seen him. They’d stopped seeing him as they stood in line at Changi Gate. He’d been sore about it at the time, but he saw the justice in it now.

He’d read an article once, in _National Geographic_ or some other goddamn educational rag, about the Ancient Greeks, back before they had white cities and carved pillars and guys in white robes sitting under trees philosophizing, how they were ruled over by these dames who chose a husband from among the young men of the tribe, and he lived in the lap of luxury for a year, doing everything he wanted, screwing everything that moved, but at the end of the year they slit his throat. But after a spell they ran out of volunteers, so they started letting them live eight years, and then one smartass said _why not a bull or a ram instead of me?_ And that’s when men got their mitts on power, wrenched it off of the women and founded Western Civilization. It didn’t say what happened if the old broad was the one who died, before her king's year was up. That was what had happened to him. He had been a year-king, and Changi was his queen. He should’ve died, but instead she did, and here he was in gin joint limbo, clearing tables, emptying ashtrays and sweeping floors, seeing people he knew who didn’t see or know him no more. A guy could get superstitious that way. Get to thinking that there was a meeting like a bullet, like a sacrificial blade, with your name on it. One person who’d see you, know you, release you. 

He thought it would be his Pa. Even after the big bust-up, the night they drank about a half-gallon of forty-rod on the road outside of Salt Lick, Kentucky and beat the holy shit out of each other, he still ran into him every few months. It took the war, the broad Pacific, to put a stop to that. 

But when his father came into Rick’s he knew Pa wasn’t the one, wasn’t his executioner. He was stumbling drunk, his clothes were shiny with dirt, and he stank, but he recognized his son, and mumbled a greeting like they’d last met a couple days, not seven years ago. He thought of Huck Finn going up to his room at the Widow's and seeing his Pap there, and realizing he wasn’t scared of the broken-down old bastard. After he read that book he used to daydream about how he could escape, hoodwink Pa somehow and light out for the Territory, but he never did escape. Hadn’t escaped yet. 

The place was mostly empty, so they sat at the bar, smoked and talked. He told him about Singapore, but he wasn’t sure what he took in. Pa’s shoulders were hunched way up around his ears and more of his teeth were missing. Then a few drinkers came in, and by the time he got back to Pa’s end of the bar the old man was climbing down from the stool. Was he an old man? He remembered Pa saying one day, out of the blue, that it was his birthday and he was thirty. He must’ve been about ten. That meant Pa was forty-eight now, if he’d been telling the truth then, but it was probably just an excuse to get drunk, back when he’d still thought he needed excuses. Pa shuffled across the dusty boards to the door. There was no need to call out or say goodbye: either he would be back, or he wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. His hair straggled over his ears, plastered across the scaly bald patch on his crown, grease-darkened gray rat-tails. 

The King knew then. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Before this ghost-life of his, the miserable twilit life of a deposed monarch, could finally come to an end, before he could lay him down to sleep, he would have to see one more man one more time, know him and be known. And that man was Peter Marlowe.

**Author's Note:**

> Gay and African American soldiers were disproportionately represented among those given 'blue ticket' discharges, neither honourable nor dishonourable, by the US military at the end of World War II.


End file.
